© Columbia University Press
Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era
April, 2008
Cloth, 272 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13964-9
$24.95
/ £14.95
"Baker succeeds in making his case . . . How fitting that Baker offers not just words
here but action too." — Erin Aubry Kaplan, Los Angeles
Times
"Betrayal: How
Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era is a
vernacular broadside, brave and funny by turns. Houston A. Baker Jr. has written as cantankerous
and eloquent a defense of the legacies of the civil rights movement as one is likely to find
anywhere. With relentless irony, he bares the narcissism, trickery, and entrepreneurial
doublethink of neocon America, especially its black representatives. Neither do the black
academostars of the Ivy League escape his wrath, sharing as they do the neocon analysis that the
agony of being black in America has to do with 'pathological' behavior rather than brutal
structural inequalities. An urgent and persuasive book." — Timothy Brennan ,
University of Minnesota, and author of Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics
of Left and Right
"Who speaks in the
interest of the black majority? Houston A. Baker Jr. scathingly argues that too many African
American public intellectuals speak in profit-generating self-interest, ignoring the real
challenges that confront African Americans in the twenty-first century in favor of a facile
condmenation of the masses. If Martin Luther King Jr. or W.E.B. Du Bois is the yardstick, Baker
suggests, too many don’t measure up Who pe. Some of these truths are hard to read, and some of
them are arguable, but Baker’s Betrayal is an important, and
absorbing, meditation." — Julianne Malveaux, president, Bennett College for
Women